the meatspace back channel.

Meatspace (noun) colloquial term for physical reality, often used to indicate the contrast between physical and digital reality while challenging the flawed assumption that something cannot be both digital and real at the same time.

Back channel (noun) A secondary layer of conversation; a more private adjunct to the visible public conversation. E.G. Direct Messages are often considered a back channel to a public twitter conversation. Twitter is often considered the back channel to public tech events.

There’s a common flaw in reasoning that needs to be addressed: for a growing number of people, digital experiences aren’t the back channel. Physical interaction has become the back channel of digital conversations conducted in public.

Something you can Google is more public, and in some senses more real, than something you can reach out and touch.

This has serious implications. When I first fell in love with ‘social media’ it was based on the value it served as a back channel - I could communicate with close friends, those who knew where to look, about what was happening in my life. My blog (on livejournal) was limited to friends, and most social sharing was conducted in closed spaces. I would look forward to being able to skip the private background information with friends, and go straight into discussing the impact of events and realizations.

As social media has become more common, and more public, it’s become the ‘public channel’, and in-person interaction has become more precious, and more private.

The digital was once a layer on top of physical lives.

Now digital is what connects all of the different physical and personal interactions of my life into one cohesive story.

The best picture of what my life looks like is available online, connecting sub-units of my existence together. Having a conversation one on one is just the back channel: private, personal, precious, but one facet of a larger picture. You sacrifice totality and comprehensiveness for specificity and focus.

The internet is no longer where people go to be themselves. It’s where each of the ‘selves’ that make up a healthy personality get glued together, and put in context.